Includes support for national flags behind the driver name in GPxSAT digital 2010 mode.
The flag images and driver nationalities are not included in the installation.
Also includes 3D sound for GP4.
See the changelog for a list of all changes.

In co-operation with Addie Walti, full GP4 custom track support has been implemented. Custom track builders should
read the GPxTrack documentation if they want to comply fully with GPxPatch, although effort is done to support existing
custom tracks without modification.

Other improvements include 100 panels and color/alpha blending in GPxCInfo, tyre type in lap log, and more.

Added an extended pause mode. This means that when the game is paused
you are able to do what you always wanted to do but were not able to.
The option is turned off by default, in case it gives certain side
effects (I didn't get any, but I didn't test it extensively). You
can find the option on the main GPxPatch tab. Setting the option
to indeterminate requires you to press Enter to active it when the
game is paused.

Announcement: GPxSAT is under development again. Markus Krötz decided to try
to take over the project to add some new screens. The first screen he has added is
a penalty screen. He also fixed a few bugs.

Added support for GP4 1.02 (patch 9.6).
See changelog for the complete list of changes.

30 Dec 2002

Updated graphics for GPxPatch 3.20

The graphics in the installation executable were not updated by accident.
A new inst-gpxpatch320.exe has been uploaded to correct this problem.
If you had already downloaded it before 11 am CET then you can download the graphics
separately here.

Added support for Live For Speed.
See changelog for the complete list of changes. If you haven't
checked out this sim yet, go give it a try. It has a free fully functional demo, including
support for multiplayer over internet.

02 Dec 2002

Searching on the message board

Maarten (the board maintainer) has implemented new search code in the board,
since the old one didn't scale properly with the increased number of messages
on the board. The new one is very fast, but still has less features:

you can only search for single words.

you can only search in message bodies (not author, subject, ip, email).

the score of each result is always 1.

all old messages are currently being added to the search index, but at
the moment only the last 3 months or so have been added. The board may be
locked while old messages are added.

Happy searching and thanks Maarten :)

22 Oct 2002

GPxPatch: Bug in physics patching in GPxSet

Luc Segers from GP4 League pointed out to me that
the car behavior was different between using GP4Phys.exe and GPxSet to patch the physics.
The checksums were also different. The reason was a bug in the patching of downforce coefficient
and will be fixed in the next version. In the meantime, I suggest that leagues
using custom physics mandate that those are patched using GP4Phys.exe. Sorry for the inconvenience.

This version enables all graphical features for GP4, including Marc Aarts' GPxSAT, which has been extended
to include the digital tv timing mode. Note that to disable GP4's timing info you have to turn off the
option "tv overlays" in the graphics options menu. Also note that GPxSound does not work for GP4 yet.

05 Oct 2002

Forum up again

After having been down for more than a month the forum is finally up again.

There is a bug in GPxPatch 3.03 that sets the post-session duration to 6000 seconds instead of 6. You can work around this
by putting the following line in gpxpdata\gpxlap.ini, under a section called [Misc]:

Removed trailing 'h' from the cc checksum (it was to indicate that it's hexadecimal, but that's not relevant).
Also updated the changelog in the HOFxLap documentation, since it was
missing some entries.

Today is the birthday of GPxPatch, which I want to celebrate with the announcement that
I will release new versions of both GPxPatch and HOFxLap (currently being beta-tested),
containing support for authentication of GP3-2000 saved games/hotlaps, and thus enabling
leagues to use GPxPatch together with GP3-2000.

Marc Aarts has released his CMagic 2000 program through my site (he has closed down his own site unfortunately).
This program is needed to put magic data into tracks that can be read by GPxTrack. This allows you to put
each track into a different slot. It also allows track makers to finetune their tracks for GP3-2000.
It can be downloaded from the download page.

Minor update GPxPatch 2.00

Note about the GPxPatch that was released last night: There was a problem with the liveries paths,
which resulting in either a GP3 crash or in completely transparent cars. I've fixed this now and
uploaded a new installation file. If you have downloaded it before Sep 21, 10AM CET then you need
to redownload it. The correct inst-gpxpatch200.zip should be 381837 bytes in size.

This version works with GP3 1.00, GP3 1.13, and GP3 2.00 (GP3-2000).
It also adds a livery manager so you can have 22 different liveries (thanks Marc
for helping out with this, hopefully you'll return and release CMagic 2000).

A bit unexpected since it has been 18 months since the last update,
but there's a new version of GP2Lap. It includes a fix
for the country adjectives (Frank fixed this a long time ago already,
but it was never released), and it adds a new page ('1') with info
about gear, revs, and speed.

I got a good tip from Cesar Mello from Brasil regarding multiplayer games.
If it would be possible to make GP3 use an IP address instead of doing a LAN broadcast message, it would
be possible for the client to join a session over the internet. So I went to work and patched GP3's calls to
DirectPlay (just a small hack). Now we could do a multiplayer session over the internet. Just one warning:
you'll need a good connection for this, and even then you can't really play with more than 2 players!
Some people already played over the internet by using Kahn, and this is just the same except you don't need Kahn anymore.

This version also has the lap times and fastest lap times (without splits though) listed in ATL in non-race sessions.

I'm happy to announce a new member on the GPxPatch team, Radu (GPXFan).
Radu is going to help me with the event sounds. Specifically, he's going
to work on multiple sounds for an event, and on a sound queue so they will
be played after each other, not at the same time. Actually, he has done
most of the work already and sent me his source code. I was impressed so I
asked him to join the team. Good luck, Radu.

The latest version of GPxPatch has fixed some problems but also added some new ones.
I'll summarize the problems that have been reported. We're trying to solve them, so
you don't have to report them to us anymore.

Black font background and blue background in finish flag.
This is probably caused by the fact that some video cards don't support
3D colorkeying (this means making a specific texture color transparent),
most notably TNT, TNT2 and similar video cards.

White blocks instead of text. Still investigating this one.

Nothing visible in linked multiplayer mode. This bug is not new,
but fixing it has received higher priority since the latest additions of
visual features.

Different grip and/or other physics. This is a tricky one, as I didn't
change anything physics related on purpose.

gpxsat.log says that the hooks fail.

This is bug in the error handling. The hooks work fine, so don't worry.
If GPxSAT doesn't work then the problem is something else.

GP3 crashing after a random period when using GPxPatch.

Some characters not shown. Most notably in German. Marc changed the
font for this to fix it, which you can
download now.

GPxTrack doesn't write back new records to custom track file. This is
by design, since I don't want to update track files. I'll try to make a patch
that can save records of any track and custom track into a separate .ini file,
which also solves the problem of records.rec only containing records of 16 tracks.

22 Apr 2001

Text positions in GPxCInfo

One thing that didn't make it into GPxPatch 1.10 is customization of the positions of the external car info (GPxCInfo).
You can do this manually by putting a gpxcinfo.ini file into the gpxpdata directory and put the following in it
(this example will put it to the right; negative numbers are added to the right/bottom):

This release does NOT yet contain tv style info or at the line. It's just to release some
bug fixes and some small features I have finished last month, but were never released.
To see what's new, take a look at the changelog.

15 Mar 2001

Site redesigned

This week I've been busy redesigning the site, so it all looks more consistent and it's easier
to navigate. It's optimized for speed and for Opera.

02 Feb 2001

I've sorted out the problem of GPxPatch 1.01 with GP3Video. So this
will be fixed in the next release.

Added in v1.02 is support for GPxLap extended data in saved games/hotlaps.

22 Jan 2001

There have been reports that GPxPatch doesn't work correcly on Windows 2000 Pro with Service Pack 1.
I'm currently investigating the problem, and hopefully I will get it to work correctly. For now, try
to use Windows 9x to run GPxPatch, if you can.

One of the features of GPxPatch is the support for a lot of track specific data in gp3.exe to
be in the track file. Track makers who want to put this data into their track file need to
download Marc Aarts' CMagic tool. It can be found on his site.

This is the successor of GP2Lap. It's a real-time extension for GP3.
The first release includes a track manager, extended save games, screenshot key,
an in-game log viewer (hardware acc. graphics mode only), 'gp3split', and more.

Note that the current HOFxLap can't view the extended info in saved games/hotlaps yet.
I'll release a new version that supports it probably tomorrow.

16 Jan 2001

Uh oh, problems...

A serious problem was found, it'll take me a lot of time to fix this, sorry
(and this was the last time I set a release date).

15 Jan 2001

GPxPatch almost done, part 2

Looks like I didn't make it this weekend either. But it's only a matter of the finishing touches
before I can release it. Don't set your expectations too high though, because there's still a lot of
features missing (compared to GP2Lap).

08 Jan 2001

GPxPatch almost done

Sorry for the wait, but it looks like I didn't finish it in time before the new year started.
I've got it ready to release, but I'm just adding a GUI launcher to it and a help file, so it'll
be easier for everyone to use. I hope I can release it this weekend. I'll need to sort out these
pages too, actually...

Besides a lot of new info and some bug fixes, this version includes a GUI version. Read the
help file for more info about bug fixes and added features.

Of interest to file checkers is the fact that for hotlaps I've changed the moment in time
of some of the fields. They are now shown as they were at the start of the hotlap. The reason
is that the other time frame is at the moment of saving the hotlap, which is arbitrary.
Affected fields are: driver aids, weight, and fuel laps.

Frequently asked question: "When is GP3Lap coming out?".
Answer: I've planned it to be released before the end of the year.
It will probably be called GPxPatch. The 'x' is there so I won't have to change the
name for each successor Hasbro releases, and it's not called GPxLap because that will be the name of one
of the components of GPxPatch. Some more info for the news hungry freaks:

Andy Barganski is working on official timing info.

Frank didn't have time to work on GPxPatch unfortunately.

What I have so far works well with GP3 1.13.

I'm currently working on HOF3Lap. Marc Aarts is doing some testing for us, and is also
working on his own hotlap checker (a GUI version). I've planned to release HOF3Lap this weekend,
which will be similar to the HOF2Lap of the pre-GP2Lap era. It will also work on Linux and some BSD variants.

13 Nov 2000

Thanks to everyone who responded to the GP3 graphics mode poll. It looks like most people are
running GP3 in hardware mode at 800x600 or at 1024x768 resolution. This means that gp3lap will
support only hardware mode in the first version, optimized for these resolutions. I'll see if
support for software mode can be added later, although my guess is that more and more people
are going to use hardware mode.

New forum

I've replaced the old forum with a
new forum.
The reason is that the old forum was using an ugly advertisement banner and also javascript. The
new forum was made completely in php3, and doesn't use a banner (because it was made for free by Laurent at
PHP lab). I've done some effort the copy the messages of
the last seven months to the new forum, but I lost the thread hierarchy and the dates for them.
Thanks goes to Sweep for help and providing
a server to run the forum on.

28 Oct 2000

Graphics mode poll

I've made a votelet (poll)
to find out what graphics mode most of you are using in GP3.
This will give me some feedback that will help me make some priorities in making GP3Lap.
Thanks in advance for your answers!

02 Aug 2000

To anyone looking for a GP3Lap and/or a HOF3Lap: I'm currently working on them, so hopefully
they can be released within the near future.